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It is a scholarly reference put together by one of the folks who spent a bunch of years in Japan training and researching martial arts, particularly koryu. It is somewhat light on content regarding Aikido and other gendai arts, because there was a certain limit to the how big the book could be, and Dr. Hall wanted to make sure he provided entries for things that did not already have a lot of information available in English. Tons of excellent koryu-related content. The entries are a good mix of details about systems and organizations, terminology, concepts, and people.

If you have an interest in the overall history of Japanese martial arts you should really pick up a copy of this.

I have the book and it is a good complement to Watatani & Yamada's Bugei Ryuha Daijiten for those who cannot read Japanese. However, I am curious about his sources for aikido, in addition to Watatani & Yamada. He lists Ellis Amdur and Stan Pranin, but his discussion of oshikiuchi, as allegedly taught by Saigo Tanomo to Sokaku Takeda suggests that he relied on other sources. Finally, the number of misprints suggests that the editing was not as good as it should have been.

Finally, the number of misprints suggests that the editing was not as good as it should have been.

Apparently some of this has to do with the software that the publisher used, which took the text from Dr. Hall's original document and put it into a new format. Some words were lost during this process.

Also, many of the lineage tables were rather dramatically altered when the publisher took them from Dr. Hall's draft to the final version. Dr. Hall was able to catch and correct most of these before final publication, but a few errors slipped through.